Greg Kappes

United States

1994

Greg Kappes

His works explore data, mediation, and the posthuman in an effort to better understand the feedback loops that (in)form our being. Born/e out of the binary soup, his time-based works interact with and act on the audience/performer by amassing a variety of interfaces which highlight our relationships with technology and with each other. Through his work, he hopes to situate technology not as a weapon of greed, but instead as an integral part of the (post)human, inseparable from and invaluable to our survival. He has constructed complex software instruments for improvisation, choreographed networks of sound-emitting cellphones, and interactive, expressive (and mostly functional) AI’s. He works largely with electronics, custom software, the prepared piano and improvisation.

Greg has had works performed at the FEASt FEST, the Center for New Music in San Francisco, and the California Electronic Music Exchange Concerts at UCSB, UCSC, Stanford and Mills College. He has also exhibited installation works at Slide Space 123 at Mills College and at the Signal Flow Festival. He holds a BA in Music from the University of Pennsylvania and received his MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College. He has studied with Roscoe Mitchell, Maggi Payne, Zeena Parkins, James Fei, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, and Anna Weesner.

GlogauAIR Project

I am currently working on building an immersive, communal experience using cell phones as sound sources and instruments. The piece comes out of a desire to lower the barrier to entry for “high-tech” performances which often require extensive institutional support as well as advanced equipment; the piece uses no technologies other than the audience’s smartphones to make sound.

With the aid of two projectors, the audience will be guided through a choreography which determines the spatialization of the sound source. The piece will make use of game design ideas such as affordances and learning curves to help the audience learn complex behaviors throughout the work, encouraging collaboration and a sense of authorship. Simple sound sources such as sine waves and short impulses will be used to create complex effects difficult to replicate even using large speaker arrays and advanced software. Audiences will be immersed in dense harmonic landscapes and fields of polyrhythm which change subtly with every movement; all with minimal setup and using everyday tech.

The interplay between various levels of control and between various audience roles has always been an interest of mine especially as I’ve worked to undermine dichotomies such as performer/audience or composer/performer (bit x bit). As I’ve moved towards installation and multimedia work, my materials have always been decidedly low-tech (cheap speakers, webcams, my personal laptop) as I believe this is a way to keep my work accessible to all audiences. I have also been interested in crafting new relationships with technology, stressing the need for a positive collaborative relationship in contrast to an oppositional one popularized in many turn-of-the-century works. The proposed project is a progression of these ideas.

The goal of the residency would be to expand and refine each element of the experience so as to incorporate a wider range of interactions in order to emphasize the goals of the piece. I want to utilize the full capabilities of the smartphone. For example, using the power of streaming technologies to split a voice across not only the frequency spectrum, but spatially across a mass of smartphone speakers in real-time. Moves like this would highlight the macro/micro relationships inherent in the work as well as the macro/micro nature of our dispersed virtual identities as posthumans. I also want to expand the audience’s repertoire of actions and shift the user between cooperative and competitive modes of interaction throughout. Some examples of this would be breaking participants into various teams at points or having a shared experience between two people, but on one device. This would require extensive experimentation. As of yet, these elements are absent or not central to the work.

light(rain) Performance, music. California Electronic Music Exchange Concerts, April 5, 2017. Selected to perform at the University of Santa Barbara and Mills College.

2016

Fanfare in C Fixed media, music. FEASt FEST, November 5, 2016. Selected as one of five works to be played at the FEASt FEST at the Florida International University School of Music,

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

2016-2018
Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA | Worked as a technical assistant. Helped students with recording equipment and taught how to use various creative software including Pro Tools, Max/MSP, and Supercollider

2016
Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA | Worked as a chemistry tutor. Made lesson plans and guided students through homework and problem-solving strategies

2014
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA | Worked as a chemistry tutor. Made lesson plans and guided students through homework and problem-solving strategies